Deborah Smith, senior administrative supervisor in the ALS User Office, plans much of work life around the annual ALS User Meeting, which is fast approaching October 7-9. Smith and her team have been hard at work creating an amazing event for the 400-plus attendees that flock to the hill each year to attend workshops, listen to distinguished speakers, and take part in the active social program.

It’s a representation of what Smith says she loves most about her job: having a chance to interact with so many different people. The day after this year’s User Meeting activities end, Smith will be right back on track planning for next year. “I literally start booking conference rooms for the next one the day that the previous one ends,” she says.

Smith is quick to acknowledge that she’s not alone in pulling off the ALS’s biggest annual event – she credits her User Office staff first and foremost, as well as ALS Communications, the Users’ Executive Committee, and the warehouse crew as key to making her meeting planning successful. “We all come together and pull it off,” she says.

This year’s User Meeting highlights include 13 workshops that represent the great science that’s happening at the ALS, Smith says. The UEC collaborates with senior management to put the workshops together, while Smith and her staff handle the logistics. Smith envisions the User Meeting growing large enough that it warrants being held off-site, which would be a well-earned challenge for her and her team.

When she’s not working on the next User Meeting, Smith might be found managing ALS user statistics for the DOE Questionnaire annual report, providing user statistics for ALS staff, monitoring security and safety training for ALS users, acting as host for the majority of ALS users, verifying publications that the DOE uses to measure the ALS, and overseeing the User Office. “Publications are the major metric of how the DOE measures the ALS,” Smith says.

Since she started in the User Office in 2008, Deborah has seen customer service as her main focus, “We want the users to keep coming back and we feel like we can do that if we make the processes as easy as possible,” she says. “We try to get them down on the floor to do their magnificent science as quickly as possible.”